Building the Innovation DNA

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Perhaps we are failing to recognise the importance of our Innovation capital, stopping to ask how really valuable knowing this is to us?

Should we care, does it matter? I would argue it does, increasingly so. Within our innovation capital lies the future of the organisation and holds one of the really important ‘golden keys’ to the sustaining performance of the company and its future growth potential.

We need to find a way to unlock this as we are constantly being pushed for new business models that create, deliver and capture value. It is in the entire makeup, the value structure around the offering, and this is made up of distinct capitals that drive the new business towards success.

If someone came to you and asked the question: “tell me what makes up your financial capital?” I expect you could answer this fairly comfortably. It might need a little added help from your finance department but you could produce and show significant details that we are all ‘schooled’ to understand and generally have accepted, as under common definitions and standard practice.

Our businesses are measured constantly on their financials, we produce a constant flow of reporting documents that provide useful insight and allow for a more informed judgement by present and future investors on the health of the company. We are ‘wedded’ to our financials and ignore the real value within our organizations of all the other critical capitals that generate and strengthen the business.

What if that same person came to you and asked instead: “what makes up the innovation capital of the company?’” could you answer this as clearly as the financial one – I would suggest most probably not. (By the way, if you feel you can then please let me know I would be more than interested). We are focusing more on past performance and not future generating potential by staying fixated on just the financials within all that makes up our organizational capital

So what makes up our innovation capital and why is it important to know?

Should we care, does it matter? I would argue it does, increasingly so. Within the innovation capital lies the future of the organization and holds one of the real golden keys to the sustaining performance of the company, or not.

Most rooms we enter have four sides; they provide the structure to build upon. Presently in many of our economies, particularly in the West, we are struggling to find real growth; we are limited on our wealth-creating possibilities. Why is that? Our structures seem to be weak not strong.

We are certainly relying far too much on ‘selected’ pockets of economic activity to keep us going. Technology is clearly one of these. Yet our longer term forces for sustaining growth remain ‘fragile’, our structures remain wickedly ‘out of kilter’ and we need to find stronger connecting frameworks that reinforce each other, so we can build further upon these to manage our business activities in new ways.

In most of our economic activities technology is playing a significant part in altering our habits, routines and thinking but it alone, is not enough. For technology to really give benefit it needs to be driven by our ability to generate wealth creating activity and that comes from integrating knowledge, gaining experience and being able to articulate this in better ways.

To achieve this, our business structures that we have in the past relied upon are in need of changing. They need different pillars to build upon.

Often surveys and reports catch you by surprise. I’ve been working through the Imaginatik Global Report called “The State of Global Innovation for 2013” and certain parts did exactly that. The sheer difficulties that organizations seem to have to quantify the benefits and value achieved through innovation worries me.

I had previously provided a review more on the Strategic and readiness part of the Imaginatik report, in my post “The coming age of innovation in 2014 and beyond” and less so on the other part discussed, the Process and Execution part.

It is the process and execution side that have more of the deeper issues to tackle and more importantly, the one’s that take considerable time if you are tacking culture and the environment to allow for innovation. They are far more complicated to provide answers too. I feel like pushing this along, here goes: